Acting like a steelhead, the trout yanked our son’s rod down and headed for the other side of the lake, stopping to perform a double somersault before falling back into the water, before changing directions and heading for a submerged stump near shore. Wade, our younger son (now 22), held his rod high and steered the torpedo-acting fish away from the bark-covered obstacle.
Wanting to arrive at our favorite mountain lake early, we’d left home just before 4 a.m. The birds were still chirping when we arrived at the Forest Service campground, launched our boat, and parked after placing a Forest Service, Discovery, and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife parking pass on the dashboard of my truck. The boat launch was empty, which surprised us considering the number of trout lurking, we knew, under the water’s glassy surface.
Since the rules on Goose Lake (located on the south flank of Mt. Adams, west of Trout Lake) don’t allow gas motors, we’d taken our Willie drift boat, complete with a cooler for lunch and fish. We see some anglers fishing this mountain lake using electric-trolling-motors for propulsion but, for us, rowing is easy and a lot less fuss.
We tried several fishing techniques during our morning adventure. The first was to slow troll, we’re talking dead slow, small F-5 FlatFish 50 to 60 feet behind our boat. Dark-colored plugs like a frog, black and brown, are what produced best on this particular day – all tipped with a quarter-inch section pinched from a white-colored PowerBait maggot. It’s always amazed me how fickle trout can be in regard to lure color and size on different lakes and at different times of year. Other plug colors we don’t leave home without include gold and silver.
This method produced for the first hour, but the trout either moved or wised up to this tactic, which forced us to try something different.
It was then that we switched to casting and retrieving spinners. All fish, especially trout, can’t resist the sonic vibration produced by a blade spinning on a wire shaft. The other thing appealing about fishing spinners (and casting spoons for that matter) is they allow you to cover a lot of water in a short amount of time.
Our best producing spinner — we’ve tried many different ones — was a black-colored Rooster Tail tipped with a half-inch section from an equally black Gulp! worm. Tipping lures with a scent-filled product works better than you might think and something we often do.
If you’re new to lake fishing, keep in mind that fish may be holding near shore or the lake surface early or late in the day (or on overcast days) and will most likely move into deeper water as the light intensifies. After all, fish don’t have eyelids (or sunglasses), so the only way they can control the amount of light entering their eye is by their location.
What we caught were a mixture of brown, rainbow, cutthroat and brook trout. The brook trout spawn naturally in Goose Lake and are so numerous they are mostly small, hardly ever do you catch one over 10-inches, which is what prompted the Department of Fish and Wildlife to first plant brown trout in the lake, which they do each and every year.
While the majority of brown trout average 12-to-14 inches, there are much larger, trophy size, ones lurking in this lake. For example, WDFW biologist John Weinheimer tells me he has handled 6- to 7-pound fish living in Goose lake. According to Bev Meyer, owner of the Trout Lake Grocery (509-395-2777), the three largest brown trout brought into her store from Goose Lake have included a 15.44-pound monster taken in 1994 that measured 31.5 inches, a 16.3-pounder caught from the east end of the lake on PowerBait in 2008, and a 10.28-pounder taken in May of 2009.
There are hundreds of high mountain lakes in the Northwest. Many only become accessible to anglers when lingering winter snows finally melt off the roads and trails leading to them, but this year’s low snow pack has made for early access and a prolonged period of good fishing. Don’t pass up the thrill of catching high mountain trout.
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